Designing Trust in Uncertain Ecologies

Climate change is not just unsettling ecosystems. It is dismantling the very fiction that nature is stable, knowable, or benevolent and that we humans are firmly established residents in any given place. Simultaneously, advances in genetic modification blur the distinction between what we consider “natural” and “designed” in the food we eat, the materials we wear, and the medicines we rely on.

“Invasive” species now form integral components of contemporary ecosystems. Yet despite these accelerating transformations during the last 150 years of industrially-driven change, we still cling to the idea of nature as whole, coherent, and trustworthy.

This track brings together approaches with the more-than-human world such as ecological design, biomimicry, biodesign, regenerative design, and multispecies design which signal broad attempts to reconfigure our relationship with living systems. It explores how trust might be redefined, redistributed and cultivated as a situated and multispecies practice in natural environments when control is limited and outcomes are uncertain.

When placing an artefact in a marine environment, nurturing a biomaterial in growth, or co-developing new habitats, designers make a foundational gesture of trust: they hypothesize that nature will integrate, respond, or transform their intervention.

This demands new forms of practice, where designers must attune to ecological rhythms, negotiate shared agency, and accept that outcomes cannot be fully predicted or controlled. This challenges instrumental ethics - framing nature as a resource to be optimized -  and instead calls for eco-ethics frameworks, grounded in multispecies care. Trust thus emerges as an ecological, cultural and political issue, shaped by translation across knowledge systems, worldviews and scales of action.

For the design community, we invite responses to questions such as:

• What does it mean to trust nature when ecological systems are unstable, historically altered, and continually transforming?

• How can design engage ethically with living systems when outcomes cannot be fully predicted, controlled or reversed?

• How can plural knowledge systems (scientific, community-based, speculative, regulatory) be integrated to build shared grounds of trust for place-based and multispecies regeneration?&

• What new ethical, legal, and governance frameworks are needed to support design practices involving living materials, genetic resources, and multispecies relations?

• How might design methodologies and imaginaries evolve to support co-evolution, shared agency and multispecies justice across scales?

• Keywords:
• Biodesign
• More-than-human design
• Multispecies design
• Environmental ethics
• Biomimicry

• Chairs:
• Taryn Mead IE University, Spain
• Nina Costa University of Aveiro, Portugal
• Pierre Oskam Urban Reefs | Regenerative Futures Lab, The Netherlands
• Carla Paoliello Évora University, Portugal

Design & Spirituality: Attuning Practices of Trust, Transcendence, and Relational Becoming

As global sociotechnical systems intensify experiences of uncertainty, design increasingly grapples with conditions of trust and distrust, calling for approaches that acknowledge the emotional, ethical, and existential dimensions of human experience. The project-based orientation of our discipline requires a position on what is ‘possible’ and ‘preferable’, which becomes crucial at a time when the habitability of the world is at risk.

The current polycrisis not only results from an ecological and a social divide, but also a spiritual one (Scharmer & Kaufer, 2013). Far from doctrine, spirituality involves a mode of attunement, relationality, and self-transcendence, sustained by attitudes cultivated through practices connecting inner and outer worlds—compassion, mindfulness, awe. Recent works suggest that refined awareness and enlarged perceptual frames support more responsible judgment, positively impacting trust-building and collective decision-making (Haidt & Morris, 2009; Xue et al., 2024).

This resonates with design approaches that emphasize in-between-ness and becoming-with (Akama, 2012), or foreground shifts between self-centredness and otherness (Neuhoff et al., 2025). Together, they outline a domain where spirituality can be engaged critically and generatively, for designing beyond instrumental rationality.

This track invites contributions that explore how spiritual sensibilities, experiences, and traditions can inform and expand contemporary design research, to cultivate the necessary conditions for trust, healing, and meaningful transformation in an era marked by profound instability.

Submissions may investigate:

• How spiritual traditions, rituals, and contemplative practices may inform design processes, pedagogies, and forms of relational ethics.

• The role of self-transcendent emotions and embodied awareness in strengthening trust, empathy, and collective sense-making.

• Design research and practice grounded in interdependence and ecological attunement, including explorations of “becoming-with” more-than-human worlds.

• Critical examinations of spiritualisation in design—its risks, misappropriations, and possibilities for culturally respectful engagement.

• The session will begin with a short yoga practice, and finish with a guided visualization (accessible to all, but not mandatory)."

• Keywords:
• Embodiment
• Spirituality
• Worldviews
• Inner transformation
• Relational design

• Chairs:
• Estelle Berger Strate School of Design, France
• Luca Simeone Aalborg University, Denmark

• Co-chairs:
• Ehsan Baha University of Alberta
• Haian Xue Tongji University
• Abhigyan Singh TU Delft

Mediating Trust through Materials Experience: Multisensory Perception and Experiential Knowledge Across Physical, Virtual, and Hybrid Worlds

The growing convergence of physical, virtual, and hybrid environments is reshaping how materials are perceived, experienced, and understood, as well as how they are trusted or distrusted within contemporary socio-cultural contexts. On the one hand, emerging technologies, including virtual and augmented reality and haptic interfaces, are challenging conventional notions of materiality by offering new forms of experiential knowledge that transform physical matter and interaction, mediating how materials are perceived and interpreted. On the other hand, the rise of distributed fabrication models, circular practices, and sustainability-driven material innovation is redefining how materials are produced, crafted, and experienced across local and global scales.

These shifts give rise to new experiential approaches that move beyond physical matter and centralized experiences, merging physical with virtual media and local making with connected networks. This convergence fosters hybrid forms of material perception and design, opening new ways to generate and exchange material knowledge within design research and practice.

This track explores how material perception and multisensory experiences are reimagined and redefined through emerging technologies and distributed practices of making across physical, virtual, and hybrid contexts. It positions materials not only as physical entities but also as experiential constructs shaped through interaction, simulation, and mediation, where trust and distrust are continuously negotiated beyond the sensory experience itself.

We invite contributions addressing questions such as:

• How are material qualities perceived, translated, or transformed in virtual, hybrid, or distributed environments?

• Which aspects of material experience can be transferred, amplified, or distorted through different media, interactions, or fabrication practices?

• How is trust mediated in material perception and experiential knowledge in relation to the contexts from which hybrid material experiences are approached?

• How do the cultural, emotional, and symbolic aspects of materials evolve when digitally designed, fabricated, or experienced across hybrid or distributed contexts?

This track welcomes transdisciplinary experimental contributions and critical reflections on:

• multisensory perception;

• haptic interfaces for material experience;

• hybrid materialities;

• digitally fabricated material experiences;

• distributed material-driven making;

• experiential material knowledge across physical, virtual, and distributed contexts.

• Keywords:
• Materials experience
• Multisensory perception
• Virtual reality
• Augmented reality
• Hybrid materialities
• Experiential material knowledge
• Digital materiality
• Digital fabrication
• Distributed making
• Mediated trust

• Chairs:
• Marina Ricci STIIMA-CNR, Italy 
• Alessia Romani Western University, Canada

Educating for Uncertainty: Trust, Risk, and Maturation in Design Education

Across pedagogical and doctoral contexts, trust and distrust act as structuring forces that shape how knowledge is produced, legitimised, and taught. This track brings together perspectives that examine how trust is built, challenged, and reconfigured through risk-taking, critique, institutional development, and educational experimentation. It welcomes contributions that explore how design education, from experimental classrooms to doctoral systems, can remain both credible and open. Two complementary sub-tracks address distinct yet intersecting terrains and the gaps between them.

Sub-track A: Educating within the Trouble – Risk and Radical Trust in Design Pedagogy

Explores risk as a pedagogical stance and trust as an ethical commitment to learners. It challenges “safe” educational models that prioritise standardisation and control, and instead examines how uncertainty, friction, failure, and discomfort can operate as productive conditions for learning in design.

Contributions may examine studios, curricula, assessment practices, or community-based settings where educators deliberately stay with the trouble, trusting learners’ capacity to navigate ambiguity, improvise, and learn through failure.

Topics may include:

• Risky or experimental pedagogical practices

• Friction, failure, and discomfort as learning resources

• Rethinking assessment, hierarchy, and authority

• Design education as futuring under uncertainty

• New communities, contexts, and formats

• MA–PhD gaps and learning expectations

Sub-track B: Maturing Design Doctoral Education – Trust, Legitimacy, Research Cultures, and Cross-Disciplinary Integration

Focuses on design doctoral education as a maturing scholarly and institutional domain in which trust must be cultivated, negotiated, and sometimes productively unsettled. Rather than equating maturity with stabilisation, it is understood as an ongoing process that supports rigour, ethical accountability, and innovation.

Topics may include:

• Credibility, ethics, rigour, epistemic diversity, and cross-disciplinary trust

• Institutional structures, funding, publishing, and power dynamics

• Supervision, assessment, teaching integration, and doctoral wellbeing

• AI, digital research environments, and evolving forms of dissemination and validation

• Doctoral futures, autonomy, precarity, and entrustment

• PhD-MA gaps and research expectations

• Keywords:
• Design doctoral education
• Academic design research
• Design knowledge production
• Research methods
• Research quality
• Field maturity

• Chairs:
• Violeta Clemente University of Aveiro, Portugal
• Andrea Wilkinson LUCA School of Arts, Belgium

• Co-Chairs:
• Philip Cash Northumbria University, UK 
• Marije de Haas Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands
• Amber De Coen PhD candidate
• Filipe Honorato PhD candidate 

Intertwined Relations

Rural environments are places of abundance and complexity. Their social, ecological and cultural layers reveal interwoven relations between human and non-human worlds, where resources, practices, heritage, creativity and material flows continually co-produce meaning and livelihood. Rather than “peripheral”, these places operate as multi-layered laboratories through which we may understand – and act within – the digital, green and social transitions of our present.

This track asks how creativity, design and critical inquiry can enable navigation of such complexity and transform the ways different agents interact across environments — digital and analogue, human and non-human, ecological and political.

Central to this is trust: trust between actors, between knowledge systems, between technologies, ecologies and communities, between practices and places. We seek contributions that explore how creative practices question, reflect, unsettle or repair trust in contexts where relations are interdependent, fragile or emergent, and how artists, designers, communities and institutions cultivate mutuality rather than extraction.

Ultimately, creative practices re-position the rural as a site of transformative negotiation, in which relationships between arts and culture, heritage and creativity, agents and landscape are interrogated through situated assessments of value, quality, impact and ethical entanglement.

• Keywords:
• Rural imaginaries
• Entanglement
• Intertwined relations
• Relational practice
• Distributed
• Decentralised
• Regenerative
• Creative ecologies

• Chairs:
• Albert Fuster The Glasgow School of Art, UK
• Prof. Joseph Lockwood Norwegian University of Science & Technology, Norway 

Design as Social Production: Trust, Distrust, and the Legitimation of Social Realities

Departing from the understanding of Design as a form of social production, this track proposes that inquiries into what the field produces must be grounded in its dialectical relationship with society. From this perspective, the Design Field is shaped by the social values of specific historical and material conditions—contemporarily marked by late capitalism—while simultaneously participating in the production, negotiation, and transformation of those values.

Social environments condition the production, circulation, reception, and legitimation of design outcomes, revealing the practices, beliefs, and power relations that sustain or contest the field.

In direct resonance with the conference theme Trust—Distrust, the track approaches Design as a key field where trust is materially, symbolically, and institutionally constructed, maintained, or eroded. In a context of accelerated technological change, AI-mediated decision-making, political polarization, and social volatility, Design increasingly mediates relations marked by uncertainty and skepticism.

Examining Design as social production thus entails interrogating how trust in artifacts, systems, institutions, and forms of knowledge is produced or undermined, and how design practices participate in processes of social legitimation—or delegitimation.

Thus, conceiving Design as social production further implies shifting analytical focus away from isolated artifacts toward the broader social totality in which the field operates. This includes ideological formations, institutional frameworks, and political struggles that precede, shape, and contest Design practice.

Through this lens, the track examines both the structural conditions that frame Design activity and the role Design plays in reproducing or destabilizing contemporary social realities.

Suggested themes include, but are not limited to:

• Epistemology of Design;

• Design History and Historiography;

• Design Criticism;

• Material and Visual Culture;

• Design, Labor, and Politics;

• Design and Decoloniality;

• Inclusion and Diversity;

• Design and the Creative Economy;

• Innovation and Technology;

• Networks and Social Media;

• Legitimation in Design;

• Design, Institutions, and Social Credibility;

• Contemporary issues in Design;

• and related topics

• Keywords:
• Criticism
• Design Field
• Labor
• Politics
• Technology

• Chairs:
• Fabiana Oliveira Heinrich Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Joana Martins Contino ESPM Rio, Brazil

Mediating Trust: Typography as Cultural Practice

Trust is visually mediated. In a globalized landscape, the "visual other"—vernacular scripts, non-Latin alphabets, and informal lettering—is often viewed with suspicion or relegated to the margins of "good design." This track proposes that typography is a foundational agent in regenerating this trust, shaping how knowledge is communicated and how cultures express themselves. We invite scholars and practitioners to explore typography as a multifaceted field bridging tradition and innovation.

We welcome proposals investigating the material and cultural dimensions of letterforms, including archival research, the revival of historical typefaces, and the role of typography in questioning cultural heritage. We specifically seek to reject the binary of "traditional craft" versus "digital alienation."

Instead, we argue that materiality and Artificial Intelligence are complementary tools for bridging cultural divides. Designers can speculate on inclusive systems that are both rooted in history and scalable for the future.

Furthermore, we seek reflections on the typographic pedagogy and contemporary design education. How do we teach typography in an age of constant technological change? How can critical, inclusive, and cross-disciplinary approaches enrich the way we design, study, and use type?

By bringing together diverse perspectives, this track highlights typography as a dynamic ecosystem. Submissions may include theoretical research, practice-based inquiries, case-studies, or speculative approaches that expand our understanding of what typography is and what it can become—moving toward a new, trusted visual discourse that celebrates both our differences and our similarities.

• Keywords:
• Cultural Heritage
• Multi-Script Typography
• Type Design
• Typographic Pedagogy

• Chairs:
• Vítor Quelhas ESMAD - Polytechnic of Porto, Portugal
• Cristina Ferreira University of Porto, Portugal
• Pedro Amado University of Porto, Portugal

Design research for equity and trust in digital and public health

Health is both deeply personal and globally significant. Pandemics, aging populations, and climate-related health challenges reveal how intimately our wellbeing is tied to planetary and social systems. The widespread proliferation of false and misleading health-related content constitutes a significant risk to public welfare, undermining public health efforts, affecting medical decisions, and eroding trust in authoritative sources. As healthcare becomes increasingly digital, information sharing, decision-making, and trust are fundamentally transforming.

This complexity makes health not merely a biomedical issue but a profoundly social and technical challenge, where questions of agency, equity, and shared decision-making become critical.

Design and design research offer numerous methods to mediate equity and trust in digital and public health. Work on information architecture, cognitive processes, and systems thinking offer methods to negotiate this sociotechnical complexity.

Approaches like value-sensitive design can help make underlying values, assumptions and power relations explicit. Moreover, feminist discourses on care, perspectives from soma design and framings from posthumanism foreground responsibility and relational forms of trust in digital health practices.

This track invites theoretical, empirical, and case-study submissions that explore the role of design in building, maintaining, and questioning trust in digital and public health. It also invites critical work that leverages design expertise to mitigate the urgent global crisis of health disinformation and misinformation.

Key questions include (but are not limited to):

• How can design foster trust between people and technological systems in increasingly tech-driven healthcare environments?

• What factors influence definitions of trust in health? When might it be necessary to question, resist, or redesign trust?

• How can information or interaction design strategies improve content robustness, clarity, and trustworthiness across health technology and media?

• How can cognitive design, behavioural design and service design improve digital health equity?

• What is the designer's role in developing ethical content delivery and digital health propositions?

• Keywords:
• Digital Health
• AI
• Care
• Health Disinformation
• Misinformation
• Post-Truth 

• Chairs:
• Anna Lisa Martin-Niedecken Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland
• Emily Groves École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland 
• Sara Goldchmit University of São Paulo, Brazil
• Tiago Barros Pontes e Silva Universidade de Brasília, Brazil 

Trust your gut, Designer as Researcher, as Subject: Towards Rigorous Introspection

"…nobody wants any more to be called a positivist… However, the institutions of positivism are still with us, are still all around us."

A lecture by Donald Schön at Iowa State University (28 April 1989)

This theme track, ""Designer as Researcher as Subject,"" explicitly challenges entrenched positivist institutions in design research by inviting rigorous use of introspective methods in design research. Positivism has historically dominated academic discourse, emphasizing objectivity and external observation. However, design inherently deals with nuanced, tacit, and deeply subjective dimensions of human experience that resist reductionist methods.

This track emphasizes the significance of researchers observing not only their own professional creative practice but also deeply reflecting on their lived experiences as humans as a way to seek inspirations.

By embracing introspective methods, including reflective design practice, autoethnography, autobiographical design, and phenomenological self-inquiry, this track seeks to uncover layers of tacit knowledge, nuanced experiential qualities, and the rich complexities of human experience that can only be meaningfully explored from within.

This proposal invites design scholars to boldly position their complete selves, professional and personal, at the heart of their inquiry, fostering methodological innovation and contributing significantly to a more reflexive, nuanced understanding of both design processes and insights into human experience that can lead to inspiring design concepts. Rather than treating uncertainty or subjectivity as limitations, this track invites contributors to consider them as sources of academic rigour.

We warmly welcome submissions that rigorously foreground introspection, establishing clear standards for transparency, credibility, and ethical accountability in the use of introspective methods in design research.

• Keywords:
• Autoethnography
• Inductive Reasoning
• Reflexive Methodology
• Situated Knowledge
• Introspection
• Tacit Knowledge
• Research through Design
• Polyphonic Inquiry
• More-than-Human Design
• Pluriversal Ontologies

• Chairs:
• Dr. Spyros Bofylatos Royal College of Art, UK 
• David Perez Lancaster University, UK

• Co-Chairs:
• Xian Hue TongJi University, China
• David Green UK Center for Ecology & Hydrology, UK

Trust by design: information design and scientific communication against misinformation

Information design has long been a powerful tool for research and education. While it is one of the most effective means of communicating scientific knowledge, it has also been used as a vehicle for misinformation. Misleading visuals and carefully crafted aesthetics can distort evidence, and AI‑generated content now adds an additional layer of complexity by mimicking credibility and potentially undermining trustworthiness.

How can scientific visuals remain trustworthy when the information ecosystem oscillates between credibility and noise, data and opinion, while decisions must be made quickly? In various fields, technical reports are often left unread; trust is instead built, tested and contested through charts, maps, graphical abstracts and data visualisations.

As collection, synthesis and visualisation processes become increasingly mediated by AI, designers must scrutinise what automation emphasises or omits, and how provenance, criteria and limitations are documented.

This track invites the community to deconstruct and reconstruct trust across the Trust–Distrust continuum, treating information design not as surface but as epistemic infrastructure: the conceptual, editorial, formal and algorithmic decisions that shape what counts as evidence, who is included in the reading, and how authors and institutions are held accountable. The aim is to explore new strategies, forms and interfaces for information design that foster confidence, critical engagement and trust in an increasingly complex information ecosystem.

We welcome contributions that show how information design delivers:

Methods and architecture:

• Goals, audiences, grids, reading flow, levels of detail

• Transparent and reproducible processes, including algorithmic/AI workflows

• Arts‑education approaches

Typography, hierarchy, colour and notation:

• Scientific legibility;

• Coherent systems that clarify data type, uncertainty and quality

Infographics and narrative:

• Integrated text–number–image

• Annotation

• Framing that make relations and implications visible

Data visualisation:

• Data modelling

• Clear encodings

• Appropriate chart choices

• Transparent handling of uncertainty

Evaluation and iteration:

• User testing for comprehension and trust;

• Metrics that inform improvements and reusable templates.

Outcome:

• Equip the field with principles, methods and tools

• Build a shared lexicon for comparability, reuse and teaching

• Affirm design’s role as a critical mediator between science and society

• Keywords:
• Arts Education
• Data Visualisation
• Misinformation
• Narratives
• Confidence (and critical engagement)
• Information Design

• Chairs:
• António Baía Reis University of Salamanca, Spain
• Emília Dias da Costa University of Porto, Portugal
• Tiago Assis University of Porto, Portugal
• Vera Moitinho de Almeida University of Porto, Portugal

Success and Failure: Understanding Trust into/through/for Design for Innovation in the Ecosystem

Design has long been a catalyst for participation, co-creation, and collective sensemaking. Increasingly, designers are relationship-builders who facilitate decision-making among different actors, across multiple organizations and within complex systems.

When designers are called upon to bring innovation to both social and enterprise contexts, they help translate situated challenges into development opportunities, redistribute power, and negotiate tensions between conventional, formal systems and lived experience. In such diverse innovation contexts, design has the power to challenge stagnant socio-economic practices through processes that seek to equip citizens to engage in and lead community-informed design initiatives.

Achieving this requires building a foundation of trust between the various actors involved, predicated on a commitment to dismantling existing structural inequalities.

The post-truth era – characterized by disinformation, polarization, and declining confidence in institutions – combined with the proliferation of AI and data capitalism, means that trust is more fragile but just as essential as ever.

This poses profound challenges to collaborative design processes, particularly when the absence or breakdown in trust among ecosystem partners can foster feelings of extractivism and leave participants worse off.

Conversely, ‘design’ can also be co-opted by others as a mere marketing spin akin to designwashing, constraining designers’ ability to effect real change from the individual to the systemic levels. By foregrounding trust as a necessary condition for meaningful design, this track aims to contribute to more resilient, inclusive, and impactful forms of innovation in uncertain times.

This track invites critical and constructive dialogue towards trustworthy pathways for innovation and collaboration in ecosystems.

We welcome contributions that examine how design and designers can respond when an ecosystem perspective is required to address complex societal challenges.

We acknowledge that these design processes are not necessarily straightforward and linear – and may even be messy at times – so we will endeavour to be a safe space for reflections on both success and failure.

Given the complexities inherent in multi-sectoral and multi-actor collaborations, this track examines the spectrum from trust to distrust across the phases before, during, and after design innovation initiatives.

• Keywords:
• Strategic Design
• Community Engagement
• Social Inclusion
• Ethical Leadership
• Innovation Ecosystem
• Designwashing

• Chairs:
• Alison Burrows Independent scholar
• Giulia Calabretta Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands
• Ana Margarida Ferreira Universidade da Beira Interior, Portugal
• Teresa Franqueira Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal
• Xue Pei Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
• Paula Trigueiros Universidade do Minho, Portugal

Trusting the collective: reflections and critique of collaborative cross-cultural multi_sensory practices

As political and economic dynamics challenge collaboration, we seek different ways to gain trust, promote a creative dialectic, and foster stronger bonds that transcend national or political biases. Design-led innovation shifts focus on the design of participatory activities and ways of working that facilitate innovative collaboration and reflective practice towards new knowledge creation.

As Manzini details, design innovation supports new collaborative and interdisciplinary knowledge that “emerge from the creative recombination of existing assets from social capital to historical heritage, from traditional craftsmanship to accessible advanced technology”. These collaborative practices are the way forward towards cross-cultural understanding and sharing.

This theme critically explores cross-cultural collaborative practices. Particularly, it looks at design-led innovation multi-sensory techniques and practices that allow for inclusive, open, and shareable engagements. We encourage a variety of visualization practices, as well as, critiques of the ‘visual bias’ in design collaborations and seek to encounter how these ‘sensory geographies’ promote new forms of engagement across disciplines and cultures.

We seek interactive presentations for our practice-led workshop allowing presenters to share their methods with the group. A two-to-three-hour format is proposed within a multi-use space or studio.

We explore these collaborations under the theme of ‘ecologies of practice’ or the “many points of interconnection and the co-production of ideas, products or actions” that defines an ‘ecology’ of practice, beyond collaborations or collectives. Ecologies of practice are where interdisciplinary making, learning, and influence arise from direct participation in activities, conversations that support the sharing of experiences. The collaborative practitioner uses a variety of sensory and visualization tools in engaging participants, promoting inclusivity, and using various symbolic meanings, to react, analyze, and synthesize practices.

In a context shaped by ongoing global transformation, propaganda, and polarized or extremist perceptions, new practices of collaboration are needed to be encouraged to flourish.

• Keywords:
• Cross-cultural collaboration
• Ecologies of practice
• Multi-sensory methods
• Visualization
• Collectives
• Social design
• Social transformation

• Chairs:
• Anastasia Zagorni CORE Kollektiv, Switzerland
• George Jaramillo CORE Kollektiv, Switzerland

Working with (Dis)Trust and Emotion in Co-design: Relational Dynamics in Practice

Collective design practices, including co-design, participatory design, co-creation, and collaborative design, involve complex relational dynamics that trust and distrust deeply influence. Power imbalances, personal experiences, or historical factors can create tensions, shaping participation, contributions, and the nature of collaboration.

This track examines the relational dynamics of collective design practices, focusing on the interplays of trust (or its absence) and emotions, particularly in contexts of inequality and ethical complexity. This includes projects involving people with different roles, abilities and needs. It also concerns those dealing with sensitive or emotionally charged topics and conflicting priorities, like in health and care environments, or when working with communities or individuals in vulnerable situations.

Trust/distrust and emotions emerge from embodied experiences, evolving in mutually reinforcing ways. At its core, trust involves believing that someone or something will act in a positive or responsible manner, while emotions arise from interactions shaped by individual and contextual factors.

Trust is considered a prerequisite for co-creation and mutual learning, yet excessive trust can foster unrealistic expectations and leave actors in vulnerable positions. Distrust might deter engagement and fuel conflict, but it might also be productive, surfacing diverse perspectives and prompting robust design inquiry. Thus, trust and distrust are here viewed as an inseparable relational dynamic of doing and undoing. We must acknowledge these tensions rather than smooth them away, favoring greater rigor and accountability. 

In this context, central questions arise. How can designers engage in ethical and relational practices with people (e.g., users, experts, communities) by paying more attention to (dis)trust and emotions? What elements shape these dynamics, and how do they evolve and organize? How to navigate these tensions and which strategies might be adopted?

We invite practice-based, methodological, and theoretical contributions exploring the relational dynamics of (dis)trust and emotions in collective design practices in community-based and/or health and care contexts. 

• Keywords:
• Trust
• Distrust
• Emotions
• Relational approach
• Co-design
• Participatory design
• Collective design practices
• Ethics

• Chairs:
• Caoimhe Isha Beaulé University of Montréal, Canada
• Rita Maldonado Branco University of Aveiro, Portugal
• Mariluz Soto Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile
• Niels Hendriks LUCA School of Arts, Belgium

Reconfiguring Knowledge Infrastructures for Design Publishing: Formats, Evaluation, and Plurality

Scientific knowledge infrastructures are a central mechanism for establishing and sustaining trust in research. In design research, these infrastructures encompass not only evaluation and peer-review processes, but also submission protocols, publication formats, editorial governance, technological platforms, and the epistemic standards through which knowledge becomes legitimate within the scholarly community.

Over the past decade, scientific publishing has been profoundly reconfigured by digitalization, open-access policies, indexing and the growing integration of GenAI. While these transformations have expanded access, they have not necessarily resulted in more trustworthy knowledge infrastructures. Instead, it has often reinforced epistemic hierarchies and inequalities and limited methodological diversity and experimentation in how design knowledge is produced and shared.

Within this context, trust should be understood not as an ethical disposition, but as an infrastructural condition designed through formal procedures and institutional choices. This track proposes to examine trust-by-design as a framework for critically rethinking the infrastructures of design knowledge production and dissemination. It invites contributions that analyze how trust is materially encoded in the system of design knowledge production.

The track aims to advance an epistemic discussion on how design research can contribute to the redesign of knowledge infrastructures that support fairness, transparency, accountability, and epistemic plurality, while remaining critically attentive to the tensions, frictions, and exclusions that characterize contemporary scholarly communication.

Guiding question:

How can design scholars apply trust-by-design approaches to the redesign of publishing practices and knowledge infrastructures to foster trust as a structural condition for fairness, equity, diversity, and epistemic justice?

The track welcomes papers on (but not limited to) the following topics:

• Standardization in design, publishing and evaluation

• Innovative publishing formats for design research

• Pluriversality in design knowledge dissemination

• Open access, equity, and accessibility gaps

• Plural evaluation practices in design research

• Critical perspectives on AI in scientific publishing

• Keywords:
• Knowledge infrastructure
• Research Equity
• Design Publishing
• Pluriversality

• Chairs:
• Lorela Mehmeti Università di Bologna, Italy
• Elena Formia Università di Bologna, Italy
• Eleonora Lupo Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Trust in the Future: Emerging Pathways in Fashion

Trust in the Future: Emerging Paths in Fashion is a thematic track of the conference focused on the future, dedicated to exploring the transformative forces that are reshaping the fashion industry. If, currently, we cannot understand what the future holds for us, it reinforces a strong need to think about the present, to trust in the future.

In fact, the need to project an unknown future generates a stable distrust in the face of major technological advances, supported by the power of AI, applied to the field of Fashion. As the sector faces unprecedented technological, environmental and cultural changes, this track invites designers, researchers, innovators and industry leaders to reflect on the new trajectories that are redefining how fashion is conceived, produced, communicated and experienced.

At the heart of this discussion is the rapid evolution of digital technologies. Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, virtual prototyping and immersive environments are no longer peripheral tools, but rather central engines of creative and operational change.

From predictive design systems to automated production workflows and AI-driven consumer insights, technology is opening up pathways that challenge traditional notions of authorship, craftsmanship, and the role of the designer. The expected confidence lies in a path that Fashion must necessarily follow toward the future. This path seeks to examine both the opportunities and the ethical issues that arise from these emerging digital ecosystems. It seeks to analyze distrust in order to generate trust in the evolution of Fashion.

Equally crucial is the urgent call for sustainability, another theme that generates some controversy and distrust from some more resistant individuals. As the fashion industry grapples with its environmental impact, new materials, circular design strategies, regenerative practices, and alternative business models are gaining momentum.

The Trust in the Future: Emerging Pathways in Fashion program aims to highlight how sustainability is not just a trend, but a structural transformation that demands innovation, accountability, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

In addition to technology and sustainability, this program also investigates broader changes in the global fashion market. Changes in consumer behavior, new retail formats, decentralized creative communities, and the rise of hybrid physical-digital experiences are reshaping the economic and cultural landscape of the sector. These developments invite us to rethink the value, identity, and future of fashion as a global system.

Ultimately, Trust in the Future: Emerging Pathways in Fashion serves as a platform to question, imagine, and co-create the next chapters of the fashion world. It encourages participants to explore uncharted directions, embrace experimentation, and contribute to a more responsible, inclusive, and innovative future for fashion. It seeks to build trust from distrust in a world that is both controversial and equally challenging.

• Keywords:
• Fashion Futures
• Artificial Intelligence
• Sustainability
• Digital Innovation
• Market Transformation
• Fashion Technology
• Innovative Fashion Production

• Chairs:
• Alexandra Cruchinho Lusófona University, Portugal